Sometimes it is worth considering a proposal which probably won’t come to fruition. This is because the very act of thinking about it helps you see more clearly what you have now.
That’s where I am with the idea of a National Home Education Service (NHES). I’m not advocating for one. I’m not even sure it is a viable proposition or a useful addition to the education system. But thinking the NHES into existence shines a light on some of the dilemmas we face in our current education system.
What do I mean by a National Home Education Service?
Essentially, I am imagining a way of children being educated without having to attend a school for all or most of the week. We might also call this a virtual education service, although this term implies the schooling all takes place online, which I don’t think is advisable. I suppose my term implies that schooling all takes place at home, which is also not what I intend. Neither term is perfect, but I’m yet to think of a better one.
Now, home education services already exist. A quick Google search will bring up many private providers who offer online lessons, tutoring and other services which supposedly replicate what children get at school, for a fee. What I am imagining differs from this offer in a number of ways. Firstly, it is a state-funded offer, indeed the core service would be state-provided (in the same way that an Academy is state-provided, but not state-controlled i.e. through a contract with the DfE). Secondly, the NHES would be free at point of use to the child/parent. Thirdly, the very existence of the NHES would begin to reshape what in-person state and private schooling offers – the ‘all-or-nothing’ model of educational provision.
It is the last point that is most radical. ‘All-or-nothing’ schooling is what has been offered to parents since the inception of mass education. In the UK, children don’t have to go to school, but they do have to be educated. The state’s offer thus far in this great experiment has been to create places called schools which children attend for 5 days a week, 190 days per year. This model is so entrenched that governments now go to great lengths to protect it, most recently through legislating that the school week must be no less than 32.5 hours of onsite provision (this equates to 6.175 hours a year, so let’s call this the ‘6175’ model of schooling). How small minded! This rigid model for what education must look like surely can’t last another hundred years. I am not suggesting we actively break it, but that it will be broken. Perhaps the cracks are already showing.
An NHES may not set out to break the 6175 model of schooling, but might end up doing so. An NHES might provide all or some of the educational entitlement of children. It might break down the binary choice of state or private provider. It might bring other providers, such as community, charitable or social enterprise, into the mix too.
If you are shuddering at the thought (and if you are, I suspect it is because your political ideologies are being triggered) then we’ll keep well away from the brink of launching such an entity and stay firmly in thought-experiment territory. We’ll just play around with the idea.
What are schools for? What is the state’s role in providing education? What is the core curriculum we think should be specified by the state?
The philosophical and political arguments about what role the state should play in educating the nation’s children didn’t go away when universal education was created, and they won’t be solved today by this blog. Rather than enter this murky debate, I want to make the point that we haven’t clearly defined what states schools should (and shouldn’t) do, and this is a problem.
I will take three examples to illustrate this point – food, mindfulness and ski trips.
Whose job is it to feed hungry children during the school holidays? It would appear that some schools take it upon themselves to do so.
Whose job is it to address the mental health needs of children? The proliferation of mindfulness programmes suggests that the boundary between creating a healthy environment and diagnosing and treating mental health problems is blurred.
Whose job is it to provide fun activities and holidays for children? Many schools go well beyond offering curriculum related educational visits when they put together their trip schedule.
I don’t have a problem with any of the above if that is what we want schools to do! The problem arises when we fail to define whether this is what they are there for.
Why is this a problem? Firstly, equity: we should be clear about what every child is entitled to receive then ensure they get it. Secondly, transparency: tax payers have a right to know what their money is being spent on. Thirdly, funding equality: why bother achieving a ‘fair’ national funding formula if there isn’t a national expectation for service delivery?
Of course, there is a benefit in schools responding to what their parents want. There is also a benefit in providing schools with the flexibility to be distinctive in their offer. However, when not insignificant resources are being redirected from core educational services to deliver periphery activities, this becomes a problem.
An NHES would force our hand. It would require us to set our clearly what is and isn’t our core state offer. Of course, we could do this anyway, but I don’t see anyone rushing to do so.
How do we raise standards? Can we move to a quality over quantity model? What do we do about workload?
Arguably, state education is overreaching. It is trying to do too much, and as a result is limited in the standards it can achieve.
This idea plays out in the funding debates. Schools argue that they don’t have enough income to deliver a quality education. Government argues that funding is at historic levels. Who is correct?
Well, both are to an extent, but they are both making the mistake of focussing on the wrong question. Before we ask the question ‘how much should schools get?’, we need to answer the question ‘what is it for?’ .
Another question is ignored due to our obsession with the 6175 model which is ‘who should provide?’. We might think it is a good thing that students take part in amateur dramatics, play in a sports team, learn a musical instrument, take part in a chess club, learn public speaking, etc. But is it schools who should offer these opportunities? Equally, does it make sense that thousands of maths teachers up and down the country are spending time setting homework, or that teachers are bribed or coerced to give up their Easter holidays to run revision classes, or that parents are relied upon to help their children out with study when they get stuck?
In the absence of a sudden willingness to spend more of the nation’s income on state education, simplifying what schools (as in those traditional bricks and mortar places) do might be our best bet in improving educational standards. A NHES may be able to take some of the work away from schools and perhaps even deliver these tasks more effectively.
Are we prepared to leave an increasing minority of students without education? How do we regulate home education more effectively? What lessons can we learn from the home-working shift?
According to an article published in Schools Week, an estimated 1.4% of the school-age population were being home educated for at least part of the year in 2021-22 (around 125,000 children). This number was up by 6% on 2020-21 following a 34% increase from the year before. It looks set to continue to increase.
We don’t know how many children are ‘missing’ from education. Local authority figures suggest an average of 0.3%, but there are believed to be many children who have never registered at a school. There are many others on roll at schools who don’t attend at all or for long periods of time (over 20% of the school population are persistently absent). Some are too anxious to attend. Some have chronic or serious medical conditions. Agencies like the hospital education service are struggling to fill the gap. What is most concerning is that SEND students and those from disadvantaged backgrounds make up a high proportion of those not in school regularly.
Schools and other agencies are working extremely hard to get students into school who ‘should’ be in school.Teachers are spending countless hours setting work for absent students or catching them up when they are back in school. Parents are struggling to help students learn at home or paying money for tutors or private home education providers, not because they are exercising their right to home educate but because they can’t get their child to school. At what point do we consolidate our efforts and provide a safety net service?
The provision of a high quality, free at point of use, core education service may well encourage more parents to home educate their children. But would this necessarily be a bad thing? Perhaps for some children, at some points in their schooling, being at home would be the best thing. If this solution is not attractive to you then I would ask what alternative solutions you have? The fact is that the 6175 schooling model is not working for many children. What do we do about that?
How serious are we about parental choice?
You don’t have to be a radical free-market ideologue to accept that ‘like it or lump it’ isn’t the right attitude when it comes to parents accessing a school for their child. Parental choice isn’t the driving force for raising standards that education policymakers in the 1980s hoped it would be and schools aren’t in any meaningful sense in a ‘market’. However, most of us would resist a return to a time when children just attended their local school whatever the quality of education being provided there.
But in many parts of the country, choice is extremely limited. Perhaps standards are consistently bad across all the local schools. Perhaps you can’t afford to live in the catchment area of the best provider, or the bus fare is prohibitive.
More likely, one of the local schools is good at some things whilst another has different strengths. It is the all-or-nothing approach that really limits choice. We buy package deals. We commit to a number of years, like a fixed rate mortgage we can’t get out of when the interest rate drops. It is not that we can’t move our child to another school, but there are penalties (broken friendships, discontinuity of curriculum) and risks (parents don’t really know what they are going to get). If we are serious about parental choice – and you may not be! – then we could do better.
Does it happen to be the case that the education entitlement we want for the nation’s children just happens to take 5 days each week to deliver? Of course not. The reason children are at school from Monday to Friday is for childcare reasons – it is the working week when parents go off to their workplaces. Or it used to be. Homeworking, part-time working. flexi-hours, and shift work mean that the reality for many families has changed considerably. If we were to design a minimum educational entitlement for children – one which we want every child in the country to receive – how much time would we need each week? What we do in schools is deliver this entitlement then fill in the gaps with additional activities.
Even if our minimum entitlement did require 6,175 hours a year of provision, would we ideally squeeze this into 190 days, leaving 13 weeks of the year for parents to find ways of entertaining their children?
There may not (yet) be a practical way of delivering a National Home Education Service, and breaking the 6175 model of schooling may not, on balance, be advisable; but thinking careful about what education we really want our children to receive is worthwhile. Going back to first principles now and again is healthy.
How serious are we about educational gaps?
I’ve made this point in a roundabout way, but it bears repeating: many children get a bad deal with our current schooling system. Whether they have learning difficulties, home difficulties, or financial difficulties, our education system is not as flexible and responsive as we need it to be.
The problem is partly localism and fragmentation. Some needs can only be met at scale, by pooling expertise and resources – the school is not the optimum unit for delivery. Some of the services we need are not deliverable by a small organisation. Multi-academy trusts can overcome these problems to some extent, but they are limited by their size, geographical spread, and school mix.
Geography is also a key constraint. The fact that schools serve their local community is both a strength and a flaw. We cluster students together according to who can get to the school. This means we get biased groups, such as clusters of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Breaking away from geography means we can group students in optimum groups, meaning sometimes bringing students together with a shared characteristic (like prior attainment or special educational need) or deliberately mixing students with particular characteristics (like social background).
Whether or not a NHES will help this, imagining what might be possible at a national scale which is not possible locally might help us identify more radical ways of reversing the growing inequalities in educational outcomes.
So there it is. You may be appalled by the idea of a NHES. You may find the arguments flawed. You may question whether it could ever get off the ground. But even if it is nothing more than a cat among the pigeons, the NHES will have achieved its purpose, which is to highlight the futility of trying to solve big problems by doing things the way we have for years. I commend the idea of the NHES to you, if not the reality.
Matthew Evans 